[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > But first things first... and this one I think is solvable - their has > got to be an equitable way to count how much code was written - maybe > it isn't lines maybe it is.... > ANd that's it - not can we make a qualitative > statement beyond that. But simply can we quanitfy the amount of code > in some fashion that allows a reasonable comparison?
Maybe a count of identifiers and keywords. Symbols like ()[];,. don't add much beyond where to parse the code. And even though operators like +-*/^&| et al convey semantics, they need expressions to operate on, in which the identifiers are already counted. You could make a case either way but I'd leave them out for simplicity. The question is how to count explicit names like module.class.func; should that be 1 identifier or 3? Counting as 3 would reward things like "from X import *" which are generally frowned on in python while 'use MOD qw(id)' is encouraged in perl. I'm inclined to just count explicit names as 1. It's still a single object, and I'm not sure a.b.c is more work to process than just c anyway. If you don't care where c is, they're equivalent. If you do care, you've got to remember where the naked c lives, so it just shifts the work from the code to your brain. Then you've got problems with implicit variables/operations. Should perl's $_ be counted? What about python's copy-slice [:]? You can drive yourself crazy worrying about such things, so I'd just start with the simple case by ignoring them. This id-keyword count would appear to be related to how much information you must process to read through the code. Unfortunately you need a parser for each language to measure it. If anyone can provide such a beast, I'll gladly run it against my code. In the meantime, line/char counts are the best I've got. -- Edward Elliott UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) complangpython at eddeye dot net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
